Vintage (31 page)

‘I called on your mother, Charlie…’

The Baron’s face was impassive.

‘Baronne Gertrude’s not eating a thing. She doesn’t look at all well.’

‘What am I supposed to do?’

‘There’s nothing you can do. I’m just telling you. I think the old lady misses Clare.’

In the courtyard at Château de Cluzac, the Plymouth Impala skirted a group of scantily dressed holidaymakers accompanied by children and laden with picnic baskets, who made their way over the cobbles towards the bouncy castle and the park. At the Baron’s imperious hoot they melted in the path of the car.

‘I wouldn’t know the place,’ Viola said, staring at two men, stripped to their vests, fishing in the moat.

‘You’ve got your daughter to thank for that.’

Opening the door for Viola, Charles-Louis, his manners irreproachable as always, helped her out of the car. Seeing him smile his charming smile at the tall, bare-legged woman with the large grey eyes who, at the sound of the horn, had run out of the château to greet him, Viola held out her hand.

‘Viola Fitzpatrick. You must be Mrs Spray. I didn’t think you were so young.’

‘This is Rosa Delaware…’

Viola looked from the strapping girl to the Baron, making an accurate assessment of the situation.
Charles-Louis
hadn’t changed.

Laura Spray had not only set the date for the wedding, which was to be the biggest three-ring circus Palm Beach had ever seen, but put caterers, couturiers, hairdressers, beauticians, builders and decorators, tent-makers, landscape gardeners, photographers and musicians from all over the world on red alert. The prospective bridegroom was relying on a divorce from Viola by requête conjointe (mutual consent), to which, as he had informed the juge des affaires matrimoniales, he could foresee no objection. He and Viola had been married for a great deal longer than the requisite six months (twenty-eight years to be precise). Both of them had agreed to the divorce. They had agreed how to divorce. And promised to remain in agreement throughout the proceedings.

Before the court hearing, the Baron, terrified of Laura Spray, who rang him daily to see how things were going, ran over the proceedings with Viola in the stables, where she was admiring a black mare.

‘There was a filly like her just now at Ballybrit,’ Viola said. ‘An old friend of mine, a retired colonel, waited twelve months, certain she would lift the Plate…’

‘We need to talk…’ Charles-Louis said.

‘She was balloted out at the last moment without even a run.’

‘About the divorce…’ The Baron was not interested in the Galway Races.

‘It was unbelievable! This is a great mare, Charlie. I could ask the Colonel would he know someone who’d be interested.’

‘There must be no disagreement between us.’

‘Why should there be?’

‘If there is any disagreement between the parties, the divorce is invalid. We’d have to start all over again.’

‘You’re the one wants to get married.’

‘And you are the one who must agree.’

‘And so I will, Charlie…’ Taking a saddle and bridle from the stable door, Viola, standing ankle-deep in straw, faced the Baron. ‘For a consideration.’

‘Consideration?’

Soothing the mare as she did so, Viola put the saddle on her glossy back and expertly bridled her.

‘You didn’t imagine, Charlie, that after those eight years at Château de Cluzac, not to mention leaving me to bring up your daughter…’

‘I rather thought it was you who left me.’

‘Indeed I did. What good would it have done to her to stay here and see her father…’

‘What is it you want?’

‘I want a million francs.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘What’s ridiculous?’

‘I don’t have that sort of money.’

‘This Rosa Delaware. Clare tells me you’re sleeping with her…’

‘That has nothing to do with it.’

‘The judge might take an altogether different view. It’s called “entrapment”. I’ve spoken to Clare. She’s willing to back me up.’

‘That’s blackmail!’

‘Call it what you like.’ Viola led the horse out of the stable. ‘I’ll ride her to Kilmartin. Like old times.’

Charles-Louis smiled. Thrown off guard for a
nanosecond
, Viola re-experienced the potent spell of the charm which had once been her undoing on the banks of
the Gironde. The memory of the long humiliation she had afterwards endured brought her to her senses.

‘A million francs, Charlie. Cash, mind…’ The mare’s hooves clattered on the cobbles, as Viola expertly mounted her, dug in her heel, about faced, and made for the archway. ‘Before the end of the week.’

Clare sat in the North room at Christie’s as the squeaky-clean auctioneer, flanked by his two female acolytes, mounted the rostrum. She opened her catalogue, Claret and White Bordeaux, and flicked through the pages as the young man quickly ran over the rules of the sale.

Satisfied to leave her enterprise in the hands of David Markham, she had not planned to attend the sale, in which several lots from Château de Cluzac were included. It was Viola, sensing how despondent she was at the fact that it would be another three weeks before she would see Jamie, who had persuaded her to take a break. While she was gone her mother would keep an eye on things at the château. She had not needed much persuading. Viola, who had just spent a few days in London with Declan, had a poor opinion of the capital.

‘It gets worse and worse. Filthy dirty it is, and like bedlam! There were a hundred thousand people in Oxford Street if there was one. And begging in the doorways – I’ve never seen anything like it. I was in Harrods for Eau de Toilette. The old lady likes her Elizabeth Arden. “Can I help you, Madam?” A bit of a girl at the cosmetics counter. “Can I help you?” I told her. “If you scraped some of that stuff off your face and gave it a good scrub with soap and water you’d look a far sight prettier.” If she was more than sixteen years of age I’d be amazed.’

Catching the early flight to Heathrow, Clare had gone straight to Christie’s. When the sale was over she would take the bus to Hyde Park to visit Grandmaman, then get
the train to Oxford and spend the night with Jamie. She had told neither of them that she was coming.

She had not informed her father about the sale. When she had looked for him, to tell him she was going to London, she had been informed by Petronella that he had left for Switzerland with Rosa. He had not indicated when he would be back.

‘There are two withdrawals this morning, ladies and gentlemen, lot one-six-two and lot four-zero-five…’

The auctioneer’s crisp voice brought her back from her reverie.

‘We start the sale with lot one, six magnums of Ducru-Beaucaillou sixty-four, which is available in bond. I start the bidding at two hundred and eighty. Two eighty, two ninety, three hundred and ten…’

Concentrating on the business in hand, Clare sat through the swiftly moving ‘dozens’ of First Growths (Lafite, Margaux, and Pétrus ’70s), names with which she had grown up, the large-format clarets (jeroboams and impériales), the Private Stocks of Le Pin and Trotanoy (in large wooden cases), and magnums of Giscours ’85 (offered duty-paid and lying in Wiltshire).

It was Big Mick who had advised her that the best prices would be realised by releasing vintages that were no longer around. To offer what was still available at the wine merchants would only antagonise the trade. The ’75 was ready for drinking, and anyone but a fool would be happy to drink the ’79…

‘Lot two twenty. Top quality claret of the
seventy-five
, seventy-nine and eighty-one vintages.’ Hearing the name Château de Cluzac, Clare felt her hands grow moist.

‘Three hundred and fifty, four hundred I’m bid, four hundred and fifty, five hundred…all done at five hundred? At the back. Lot two-two-one, one dozen bottles… Three hundred and fifty I’m bid, four hundred,
four hundred and fifty, five hundred, five hundred and fifty – in the front – all done at five hundred and fifty…’ Like a mantra the voice droned on disposing in seconds of the cellarmasters’ consummate art. What was it Nicola had said? A great picture could be hung on the wall and looked at; a great wine was finished the moment you opened the bottle.

Several thousand pounds richer (a drop in the ocean when it came to replacing her barrels), to the tune now of Château Chasse-Spleen, Château Haut-Bailly, and Château Cos d’Estournel, excusing herself as she went, Clare pushed her way, with her two large duffle bags, along the tightly packed row of wine buffs, onlookers and serious bidders clutching their numbered paddles.

Although it was almost one o’clock by the time she got to Hyde Park, Grandmaman, wearing a lace peignoir and sitting in the armchair in her bedroom, reading the obituaries in The Times, was still in deshabillé. She was as dismayed by the fact that her granddaughter had found her not yet dressed, as was Clare at seeing the Baronne anything but immaculately turned out.

‘Es-tu malade, Grandmaman?’ Remembering what Viola had said about the Baronne’s lack of appetite, Clare kissed the papery cheeks and enquired if she was ill.

‘Certainly not. The sun is so warm through the window, I thought I’d be a little lazy.’

‘Lazy’ did not feature in her grandmother’s vocabulary; Clare had never heard her use the word.

It was not until after lunch, during which she had merely pushed her food around her plate, that Baronne Gertrude, dressed now in black crepe with sparkling white collar and cuffs, confessed that she had gone to see the doctor concerning a symptom which she did not wish to disclose.

‘He would like me to attend the hospital for some further investigations.’

‘Who will go with you?’ Clare was worried – Grandmaman was never ill.

‘I am not going to the hospital. I do not care for hospitals.’

‘Then why did you go to the doctor?’

‘I wanted to be sure. When Lydia Fermoy was in St George’s, God rest her poor soul…’ the Baronne crossed herself, ‘the women were walking round the ward in their chemises de nuits! No sign of a gown. Poor Lydia. They took blood from her veins, aspirated her chest, injected her with pain-killers, stuck tubes… everywhere. And expected her to eat food I wouldn’t give to my cat.’

‘You haven’t got a cat, Grandmaman.’

‘I have not the slightest intention of being subjected to such indignities.’

‘They only want to investigate.’

‘The moment I was baptised, my body became the temple of the Holy Spirit. It is going to rise again to everlasting life. I intend to treat it with respect.’

‘There are drugs…’

‘Drugs! They pumped Lydia Fermoy full of antibiotics. Each time she went towards her Maker they called her back again. “Our body is a machine for living. That is what it’s made for, and that is its nature. Leave life to take care of itself, and don’t interfere…” Why are you crying?’

‘I don’t want you to go…’

‘I’m not going anywhere. Read your Bible. John, Chapter Eleven. On the immortality of the soul. I’m not afraid, you see. Jesus Christ went through the whole cycle himself so that we would know ahead of time exactly how things would work.’

‘You’ve probably got something perfectly straightforward which can be treated.’

‘“Old men must die. Or the world would grow moldy, would only breed the past again.”’

The Baronne, who was getting tired, did not protest when it was time for Clare to leave. Realising that time was probably of the essence, she made up her mind to get Jamie, who hadn’t seen her for a few weeks, as well as her father, to speak to Grandmaman, who had always been obdurate.

‘See you soon.’ She put her arms round the old lady.

‘I rely on you,’ Baronne Gertrude said, ‘to keep our petite conversation to yourself. I’d rather you did not discuss the matter with Jamie, and I shall be particularly angry if you mention it to my son.
Charles-Louis
has shown no indication of caring whether I am alive or dead.’

‘I’ll come again…’ Clare avoided the issue. ‘As soon as I’ve got my harvest in.’

‘“And God who made shall gather them.”’

‘That’s if the weather holds!’

‘I was not referring to the grapes.’

Looking out of the window of the train on the way to Oxford, at the English fields and hedges – how strange it seemed that there were no vines – Clare thought about the Baronne’s obduracy. They didn’t seem to make people like that any more. People with minds of their own, who accepted responsibility for their actions and who were not at the mercy of bureaucracy or of the State. She thought of her own mortality, of which she had been made disturbingly aware at school. If you died with your sins forgiven and your atonement made in full sacramental communion with the Church, with a bit of luck you would go straight to Heaven, to enjoy for ever the presence of God. If you died unrepentant, with unforgiven sins so
serious that they imperilled your soul, you could look forward to hell and everlasting torment. It was this dire threat that kept the girls at St Mary’s repenting every day. Sometimes they turned the need for penance to good account, giving up a meal during Lent, or sending their pocket money to foreign missions to feed the truly hungry. Steeped in the fear of the ultimate personal judgement, which could be rescinded only at the end of time, when the last trumpet sounded and the dead were to be raised, they had compared the divine revelation to a package deal, paid for with Christ’s suffering and death, to which nothing could be added and from which nothing would be taken away.

Although she had lost her conviction in Catholic tenets at school, where she had sprinkled rose petals in the paths of priests and always been picked to play Mary in the Nativity play, her lack of absolute certainty about the absence of an afterlife, the possibility that she might be turned back at the Pearly Gates and punished for ever, acted occasionally as a constraint on her behaviour.

In the taxi to Waterperry, she decided that she would take her chance and figure it all out when she got there. St Augustine himself had problems explaining it. Turning her thoughts to Jamie, and reminded by the strange odour which emanated from her duffle bag and pervaded the cab, she remembered the melon from Cavaillon, the Reblochon cheese, and Sidonie’s tarte tatin
which would form part of the meal with which she planned to welcome him home from the hospital.

Pushing open the wooden gate, with its warning ‘Beware of the Dog’ (although Jamie had no dog), she stood for a few moments in the overgrown front garden. The cottage, with its dipping roof and missing tiles, was a far cry from the austere façade of Château de Cluzac. She automatically dead-headed a few time-expired roses. The petals fell, like confetti, on the path.

Opening the front door with her key, she stopped dead and wrinkled her nostrils. Even the smell of the Reblochon, now decidedly overripe, could not disguise the aroma of stale cigars.

On the wooden draining-board in the kitchen there was an empty panatella packet and two coffee mugs, one with a crescent of orange lipstick. On the bentwood coatstand (she had bought it at a country fair) next to Jamie’s running gear, hung a shocking-pink PVC raincoat, and an outsize Hervé Chapelier bag.

Upstairs in the bedroom, with its sloping ceiling, a pair of discarded black tights danced by themselves on the duvet. In place of her scarlet kimono with its dragon motif, a black satin housecoat hung from the hook behind the bathroom door. Feeling her way, like a blind person, she touched an unfamiliar hairbrush laced with red hairs, green nail lacquer, an underwired bra. Almost falling in her haste to get down the steep and narrow stairs, she picked up her malodorous duffle bag and left the cottage, slamming the front door behind her.